bearing blog

Mysteries.

One of the side effects of co-schooling comes when it's time to sit down and update my end-of-the-year school records.  Sometimes when you see it all together, the effect can be surprising.

 See, I like to transcribe highlights from my daily what-we-did-today sheets into a sort of journalistic what-we-did-in-each-subject-this-year record.   It's all the same information, but sort of re-shuffled:  from a daily page that says, "art - we did this lesson" and "handwriting - we did that lesson" each on a separate page, I get a couple of paragraphs that sum up "all the art lessons for the year" and "all the handwriting progress for the year."  I find it to be a worthwhile exercise, especially when I need to gauge how fast I should plan to work next year.

So, surprising.  Here is a highlight from my seven-year-old's record for the third quarter:

Fine Arts

The seven-year-old continues art appreciation lessons.  In one lesson (combining science and art) the seven-year-old studied paintings and engravings of birds 1500-1940 from The Art of Ornithology by Elphick and Audobon's Birds of America.  Issues discussed included artists, methods, drawing from models vs. drawing from life, the purpose of this kind of art, and how the backgrounds often show food sources and habitat.  The children discussed how the naturalist's purpose in creating art differs from other types of artists.  He chose a favorite ornithological drawing of an avocet. 

In another lesson he studied Raphael's "The Knight's Dream" and discussed color, detail, and symbolism, as well as locating the painting in space and time on a historical map.   Raphael's "St. George and the Dragon" was studied and compared to "The Knight's Dream."  

   

Raphael's "The Sistine Madonna" was studied and used to discuss technique, symbolism, development, and the idea of painting "things unseen." 

Raphael's "Miraculous Draft of Fishes" was studied along with the story from chapter 5 of the Gospel of Luke.  

In Music Theory, the seven-year-old reviewed the names of the notes over two octaves, both on a keyboard and on the staff, and then began a study of intervals.  First he learned to identify 2nds and 3rds by written notes, on a keyboard, and by ear.  Then he learned to identify the second through seventh intervals.  He and other children learned to circle-sing thirds on a mock piano keyboard.  They played "Guess the Interval" with a bell set and a piano.  They learned to sing second through seventh intervals on C major.  

Um.  I didn't have much to do with this.  Art appreciation and music theory is what Hannah does while I am teaching Latin and history to bigger kids.   Reading this over I am blinking and thinking:  Really?  My seven-year-old?  

And:  We managed that and we managed to feed them lunch twice a week?

I sincerely hope she is as impressed with what I taught her kids as I am with what she taught mine!

Teething.

Not much more to say about this one.

Slow posting.

This is just a placeholder post while I finish my coffee before running upstairs to haul children out of bed.

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It's sort of our first week of summer.  I say "sort of" because we actually have one school-week left, which we're doing next week.

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It's the time of year where as you drive around town you see big lawn signs out front of all the Protestant churches announcing "Kids Adventure Camp!" or "Jump Into Summer Fun Week!"  When I was little, I am pretty sure they called it Vacation Bible School.  I think they still call it that ("vee bee ess") out loud, but it does not appear on the lawn signs anymore.  

My kids are going to a VBS camp entitled "Immaculate Mary:  The Story of Saint Bernadette and Our Lady Of Lourdes!"

(I love our parish DRE.)

We don't have a lawn sign.  Maybe we should.  Except then the camp might fill up even faster than it already does.

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I'm volunteering in the nursery this year.  Margaret took a good picture of me with my coffee and the other nursery volunteers.  I don't photograph particularly well so I'll link to this one because I like it.   She's a good photographer, or at least she has a damn good camera.

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We are having a very dental week.   The seven-year-old needs a filling, the four-year-old has an abscess and needs an extraction, the sixteen-month-old is screaming teething on two sides all night long, and the ten-year-old -- about whom the dentist announced to us, "This kid is never going to have a cavity, count your blessings"   -- has an orthodontia consultation this afternoon.  Here's hoping the outlook is sunny there.

 

(UPDATE:  Braces are not in our imminent future but will remain an option farther down the road, and probably a minor option at that.  So.  Good.  But.  This poor teething baby is SO NOT HAPPY.  I think we'll be exercising the "quesadillas for dinner" option.)

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OK, coffee cup's empty.  I've got some good homeschooling posts in the queue, I think -- my internet-safety lesson for middle schoolers, and I'm almost done collating the information for my three-year literature-based American history curriculum, which I'm gonna put up free of charge.

But somewhere in there I plan to head out to the playground.

Have a great day!

Messy piles for efficient storage.

A few days ago I wrote about how I discovered that stacks of disorganized files, despite being ugly, can actually be an efficient way of dealing with many kinds of household paper records.    They cost time in file-retrieval, but they save time in file-storage (since you don't have to take much time making folders and putting them in the right spots).  This kind of storage is only appropriate if the piles stay where you put them, and if it's much more important that you be able to easily put files away than that you be able to easily retrieve them -- that is, if it's okay if it takes you a while to find what you're looking for as long as you know it's in there somewhere.

In this post, I write about how I changed paper-storage in my schoolroom to exploit this principle:  How can I best use messy piles as quick, safe storage?

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The whole concept is counterintuitive -- we assume that a system must be tidy to be efficient, and conversely, that tidying will make us efficient.  But tidiness takes work.   Whether that work pays off depends on how much time you can afford to spend putting something away, how long you expect to store it before the next time you need it, and on how much time you can afford to spend locating and retrieving it.

Lots of homeschool items must be kept safe.  The law requires me to keep copies of certain forms; I want to preserve a "portfolio" of each child's selected artwork and writings; I must keep and add to the current year's school records, aka "grades"; I already printed up some worksheets and I want to assign them in a few days.  I also have to promptly put up certain dangerous tools like the hot glue gun and the craft knife.  But only sometimes do I have the leisure to carefully store files and tools away in an organized system.  And only some of these things need to be kept close at hand.

So let's look at the different categories of "kept items" for the homeschool. 

• I have time to store it carefully, and I need to find it quickly
• I have time to store it carefully, but I don't need to find it quickly
• I don't have time to store it carefully, and I don't need to find it quickly
• I don't have time to store it carefully, but I need to find it quickly

Things I probably have time to store carefully away in a file, and might need to find quickly:  vaccination records, other medical records, annual reporting forms, the results from the standardized testing.  

The reason I have time to put these away properly is because I don't deal with them every day.  I only generate them once or a couple of times a year, and that's enough of a special occasion that I'm willing to take the time to file.    For these, I keep a small box of hanging files.

 

 

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Things I have time to put away at my leisure, and can take my time finding:  curricula that I'm done with for now but might use again.  I keep this stuff in a storage area in the basement, in big bins on big shelves, along with the camping gear and Christmas decorations.

 

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Things I don't have time to put away carefully, but that I want to keep for a long time, and probably won't need to find quickly:  selected work to archive permanently, and the records of what we did every day (the "lesson plans/grade books").  For these I have a two-stage system.   I keep one magazine file for each child, labeled "Records," close at hand on an upper shelf of a bookcase in my school room.   

   <--closeup       ........ 

When I select some child's artwork for his "portfolio," I stow it in the appropriate magazine file.  I also drop daily and weekly records and grades, some assessments, and other things in these files as they are generated.   Then, when the magazine file is full or the year comes to an end, I transfer the material to one of the labeled bins in the basement storage area.

....eventual destination--> 

 (I don't have much space in my schoolroom, so I don't save everything; a lot of stuff gets tossed instead of stowed in the portfolio file.  A person with enough room for a big bin might save everything, let it incubate all year, and cull it at the end.  There are some advantages to this idea, but as I said, I don't have enough space to save everything, so I don't.)

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 Things I don't have time to put away carefully, but that I will need pretty soon, and won't want to spend time searching for:  schoolwork sheets that I'm preparing and assembling for upcoming lessons; schoolwork that's partly done and needs to be worked on again; finished work I need to go over again with the children; library books.  

Much of the material we use daily -- the self-contained textbooks and workbooks -- are kept in each child's desk drawers.  Basically, if it's all bound up nicely so a child can care for it easily, it lives in their desks.

   ... spiral-bound or tear-off math books ... spiral-bound  handwriting and art

 

But for other subjects, I seem to need to temporarily store a lot of loose paper during school planning or between assignments.  History, for example, with all the maps, or Latin, because I often make up translation worksheets.   For these I use stacking plastic in-baskets, one for each subject that takes a lot of paper to prepare to teach, especially paper that I need to keep on hand for a few weeks and use intermittently.    Some subjects get their own stack box, and then I try to have a "misc." stack basket as well. 

 ... always keep a baby spork handy

 

  The stack boxes are only for loose paper (and sometimes for small books) --  books, being reference materials, are shelved normally, and I mostly try to use binders, not for filing, but for keeping papers together that are supposed to stay that way.  Pseudo-books.  I try to keep library books in a basket unto themselves, but I won't deny that they often wander off to a child's bedroom.  

 

(A side note:  If you've ever used David Allen's productivity system, Getting Things Done -- or GTD as it's often called -- you might recognize that the stack-baskets function as context-specific lists of action items, where the context of one basket is @planning history and the context of another is @planning Latin.  I can only concentrate on one subject at a time, so each one may as well be its own context, right up there with @calls and @computer and @home and @errands.)

 

It's true that within a stack basket, the papers are disorganized.  I have to shuffle through them to find the exact one I want.  But it's a manageably-sized pile, and -- most importantly -- it is very quick to put something away in there.  Much quicker than filing it, or even than hole-punching it and putting it in a binder.   I don't have to think, "Argh -- got to file this -- oh well, I'll get to it later" and leave it on the counter where something might happen to it.  I can just stick it in the appropriate basket, and trust that it will still be there when I need it the next day or the next week.

What goes in these boxes in your diagram?

Nerd mom.

I like Jamie's my-little-boy-is-growing-up-(sniff) story from yesterday.  I like it a lot.

It's good to be a nerd.

Not that kids are slime molds or anything. 

All I'm saying is, I may not be a speech pathologist like Jamie, but the language of nerd is a universal one, and nerd-mom is even better.

(Comic here)

27:30.

Just a brief interjection here:  This morning I ran my fourth 5k, and I set a new PR at 27 minutes 30 seconds.  I placed 64th overall out of 160, and 22nd out of 90 women.  Third out of the 15 women in the 35-39 age group.

I did much better than I expected, given these four facts:

(1) It's my first race using the forefoot strike (aka Pose or Chi running, and often used by the barefoot running types, though I run in cross-country flats).  You may remember that I took a running clinic last year in which I learned the new form.

(2) I haven't been training on pavement at all since I started forefoot striking.  Only treadmill and indoor track.

(3) It didn't occur to me to sign up for the race until about 5 pm the evening before, when I was surfing around and discovered that one of my favorite small local races was scheduled for 8 am.  (Just as an aside:  I am so thrilled that I can just decide in the evening that I'm going to run a 5k the next morning.  That rocks.  I love the internet.)

(4) I forgot to eat breakfast.

For all those reasons, I went into it reminding myself that I didn't want to push too hard.  Still, when I checked my stopwatch at the one-mile mark, I found that I'd run my fastest-ever first mile.  Oops!

A couple quick takes:

-You know how they tell people not to worry about whether your gear looks like "real" running gear because nobody notices it?  Lies, all lies.  The man warming up next to me at the start said, "I see you've raced before.  You're wearing flats."

-Just as they were telling us to get ready, the big purple inflatable START arch suddenly went flaccid and collapsed in front of us all.  They had to delay the race a few minutes while the volunteers removed it.  (It was back up again in time for me to cross it going the other way at the end)

-Also the first race that I tried listening to my iPod while I ran.  Wonder what the people next to me were thinking when "The Time Warp" from The Rocky Horror Picture Show came on and I suddenly blurted out, "Group sex group sex group sex."

- Oddest thing I noticed that I attribute to the forefoot strike:  I felt physically more comfortable running uphill than running downhill, which is a first, believe me.  I tried hard to work it.

Tidiness and efficiency are not always correlated.

It used to be that the "find files" or "search" option on a personal computer, or in an email program, wasn't very good.  Remember? 

Cue the wayback machine.  Once upon a time,  if you had a lot of documents and you wanted to be able to pull up an old one quickly, you'd better have your documents folder organized.  Folders within folders:  Spreadsheets > taxes > 1994.  Or at least you should be good about putting enough details in the filename that you could pick it out of a lineup. Remember that?  It was especially hard back when you had to name a file in eight characters or less.  (Now I'm really getting nostalgic.)

Not so anymore, right?  (Except maybe for photos, which as of this moment aren't very searchable unless you name them carefully.)  Here in 2011, if I want to find some old document  on my Mac's hard drive, I type a few words into the search field, and it appears.  Knowing the filename may help; often it doesn't matter because the search terms can come from the contents.  I don't have to remember if I called it  "new grocery list" or "shopping items" or  "Highway 7 Cub Foods"  -- if I type "triscuits" I'll find what I'm looking for. 

So now I don't spend a lot of time dragging files (except photos) in and out of folders just so I can "find" them later, or thinking carefully in which folder to save a particular file.  I occasionally group documents for some other reason -- such as uploading related files simultaneously -- but not for retrieving them.  I save most files right into the default "Documents" folder, and I trust the operating system  to search for it if I ever need it again.

Makes you wish you had a search engine for paper, doesn't it? 

Some time ago I needed to get some information from the list of covered items in one of our insurance policies.   I didn't need the information particularly quickly, but it was important.  The insurance policies are something that Mark, rather than I, usually deals with, so I went upstairs to the desk where Mark pays the bills, and started looking.   I checked the filing cabinet first -- not there -- then started going through the stacks and baskets of documents and papers on the desk.  I expected it would take me a while, fifteen minutes or so, but I wasn't worried, for several reasons:

•  I wasn't actually in a hurry
• I was motivated to find the policy, so I knew I wouldn't give up
•  I knew I would recognize it the instant I uncovered it
•  and I knew it was here somewhere, in one of the piles.

And I did find it.  I copied down the information I needed, left the policy where I found it and went off to do my work.

So the piles ... worked.

+ + +

That was on a day when there were a lot of tall piles on and around the desk.  Sometimes they're fairly well corralled:

    

The filing system will never get that upstairs home office a photo shoot in House Beautiful or Real Simple. 

 

They sometimes look as if there's nothing systematic about it.  

And it's too bad that they cover up the beautiful built-in desk tops that Mark built to fit perfectly into the tiny niche at the end of the hall. 

 

But the truth is that whatever state they're in, they function adequately for us as a document-retrieval system.  Here's why:

First of all, we rarely need to find any of that stuff quickly.  In fact, we rarely need to find anything in there at all.  Especially now that so much information is stored electronically, of all the paper we have to save, most is there only "just in case" we need to look at it or produce it later, not because we expect  to need to refer to it often.   Tax documents from one to five years ago.  Insurance policy numbers and coverage information.  Our college transcripts.   None of that stuff needs to be at our fingertips.  I can count on one hand the number of times I, personally, needed to search for a document in that office in the last two years.   I assume Mark has some system for keeping track of the tiny fraction of files up there that are active for him.  (I keep "my" stuff somewhere else.  This is probably a key feature!)

Second, there isn't a whole lot of junk there diluting the important things.  Oh, there's some things in the "maybe we should save this" category, but Mark's pretty good about recycling paper we won't need.  So the stacks aren't so large and stuffed full of irrelevant material that I know it'll take forever to find something.  It will take minutes. It will not take hours.  

Third,  when he or I puts a file in a stack up there, it stays put until he decides to do something with it.  The papers in the stacks are safe there, or at least, safe enough for us.  The upstairs office, tucked at the end of a hall, is out of the way of daily living; the stacks do not get knocked over, nor do they accumulate much irrelevant junk.  I do not mess with the stuff except to look for things from time to time.  The children know they are not to touch "Dad's papers."  So, to put it succinctly, if it's up there, we know if it's there somewhere.

Fourth, it's easy to put a document into the system, because it doesn't much matter exactly where it goes.   And that's important, because all the documents have to get into the system.  On top of the nearest pile is good enough, or in my case, into a particular wire basket downstairs that serves as an "in-box" from me to him.  

(Note wire basket inbox, containing -- besides mail -- Chapstick, a bicycle headlamp, the packaging from his new heart rate monitor, and always -- always -- several screwdrivers)

(If your husband's household inbox does not have room for random screwdrivers, then there's a big part of your problem right there, I'll bet)

(Because there's also no search engine for screwdrivers yet)

(No comment shall be made on any similarities that might be found between the stacks upstairs on the desk shelves and the stacks of recipe books on the kitchen shelves)

 

Ahem.  So the system, though not pretty, works.  The basic reason why conventional organization isn't necessary here -- and maybe would even be a hindrance -- is that, given the kind of files we keep, quick and easy file storage is much more important than quick and easy file retrieval. 

 If you want to find something, it must still exist somewhere.  If you don't put it away promptly, an important document might sit around in an unsafe place -- like the kitchen counter or a schoolroom table -- long enough to get damaged or lost.  Putting it away where it's safe is obviously a prerequisite.     But it has to be easy.   If it was a lot of trouble to put a document into the system, chances are that we would procrastinate on the filing.  There just isn't much intrinsic motivation to proper filing.  

   Even if, like me, you already own a really cool label maker.

 

On the other hand, if I need to find something, well, that is a fairly strong intrinsic motivation.  I trust I'll be motivated to riffle through the piles of paper until I uncover the one I'm looking for. 

So it's okay that it takes a while to find something.  It's not okay if it takes a while to put something away.  

(This is not true for every household or every function -- but it happens to be true for mine.)

If it obeys this rule, an untidy system works.  It might even work better than if it were tidy, because keeping it tidy -- just so I might be able to find something a few minutes more quickly later -- would cost us time.  I'm not sure that time would be a good investment.

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When I realized this basic need, it changed our paper-handling in two important ways.

First, I stopped bugging Mark to clean up the papers on the desk.   The system works, and at least until we decide we need to clear more space for writing, there isn't a reason to find a different place for the piles.

Second, it opened my eyes to how I, personally, handle paper -- and many other items -- in the homeschool.

 More on that in another post.

 

Blogging outage.

My internet pipes are clogged, and. Comcast can't send the plumber till. Wednesday. You'll have to talk am

 

UPDATE ONCE I SAW THIS:  ongst yourselves.  Stupid phone.

Alternatives.

Probably on account of hearing it so much when I was growing up, I like to have an alternative to "Because I said so."

Around here, we like to say "Because I am arbitrary and capricious."

How about you?

Reunion.

I really should be using Google Maps to find a Mr. Tire that's open early on Saturday mornings within walking distance of a coffee shop, but I'm putting it off just a few minutes.

Everyone else is at the Minnesota Catholic Homeschooling Conference and I'm not.  I would make a frowny face except that the reason I am not there is that my husband is actually HOME tonight.

 He has been on business travel for 16 out of the past 33 nights.    He will be leaving again soon for another series of trips.

I could have looked at it this way:  I've been doing a lot of single-ish parenting over the last month, and there's more coming up, and I could use a break.  And I could have headed off to the conference and left him with the children for a little breathing space.  And that would have been fun.  And totally understandable.

But it's also kind of nice to spend the afternoon having lunch together, and tidying up the house together, and doing the giant quarterly nonperishable-goods shopping trip together, and taking everybody to the gym together, and going out to  the kids' choice of restaurant together (The new Asian buffet!  The one they've been begging to go to for months!  Where 3 out of 4 of my offspring decided to pile their plates with pepperoni pizza!), and looking forward to maybe having a drink together at the end of the day, after we send the kids to bed. 

Yeah, I think I could go for that.